What relationship coaching costs, and when it isn't worth it

Pricing pages in this field are a genre of fog: “investment varies,” “book a discovery call,” packages named after gemstones. I think you should be able to find the numbers, all of them, before you talk to anyone, so here they are, mine included, along with the more useful thing nobody publishes: the list of situations where paying me would be a mistake.

The numbers, stated plainly

In the US, published guides put relationship and couples coaching somewhere between $75 and $300 a session, with experienced specialists above that, and packages commonly running from several hundred dollars to a few thousand. Mine: sessions are $200. Most couples do the full twelve-session arc for $2,400, payable at once or in three payments of $800. The five-session decision work is $1,100. The first conversation is fifteen minutes, on video, and free, and its actual purpose is sorting fit, including telling you when the fit is bad. The complete sheet, refund rule included, is on the how it works page.

For comparison, since you’re probably shopping both aisles: private-pay couples therapy in US metros commonly runs $150 to $250 a session and often more, usually open-ended rather than a fixed arc. Insurance sometimes helps there, with catches worth knowing: coverage generally requires a diagnosis, and a couple’s problem often isn’t a diagnosable condition, so it gets coded onto one of you, into that person’s permanent medical record, and the couples work rides along as treatment for it.

Why insurance never applies here, and what you get for that

Coaching is not health care, so no insurer will ever reimburse a dollar of it. That’s a real disadvantage and I won’t dress it up. What you get in exchange is the other side of the same coin: no diagnosis, because I’m not diagnosing anyone; no medical record, because there is none; nothing about your marriage coded as anyone’s disorder. Whether that trade favors you depends on your situation and your wallet, and the fuller version of the tradeoff lives on the coaching vs therapy page, which I’d read before buying from anyone, me included.

The comparison that matters

The real alternative to coaching is rarely therapy. It’s the free option: staying stuck. And the free option has a price you’re already paying, in years. The crude version of the math points at what a contested divorce routinely costs, which runs well into the tens of thousands once lawyers are fighting in earnest, and against that, $2,400 looks like a rounding error. But I distrust that math as a sales pitch, because fear-of-divorce arithmetic can sell anything. The finer version is the honest one: the same fight, run for another decade, costs the two people having it something no invoice captures, and whether $2,400 is worth it depends entirely on whether the thing being sold actually interrupts that fight. Which is exactly the question to bring to anyone’s free consultation, sharpened.

When it isn’t worth it

Some situations where you should not hire me, stated as plainly as the prices. If there’s violence, fear, active addiction, or an untreated serious condition in the house, coaching is the wrong purchase, licensed care comes first, and I’ll say so in the free fifteen minutes rather than discover it in session four. If one of you is already done and performing otherwise, the honest purchase is the small one, the decision work, not a twelve-session rebuild one of you is quietly boycotting. If what you want is a referee to declare you right, a friend will do that for free. And if the plan is that I’ll change your partner while you watch, no one can sell you that, though plenty will try.

How to read anyone’s pricing page, including mine

Three flags, wherever you shop. Prices that only exist inside a phone call: that call is a qualification funnel, and the fog is the strategy. Open-ended weekly billing with no defined arc, no checkpoint, and no stated ending: drift is profitable, and someone should have to explain to you, on a schedule, what you’re getting. And guarantees: nobody honest guarantees another person’s marriage. What a fair structure looks like is boring and checkable: posted prices, a set arc, a written accounting partway through, a stated refund rule. Hold my pages to exactly that standard, and if they ever fail it, tell me.